Cardinals move on from first loss, prepare for Lions

TEMPE, Ariz. — If they wanted, the Arizona Cardinals could look toward 90s rock band The Cranberries for a little pep talk as they prepare to face the Detroit Lions this week.

Do you have to let it linger?

No, they don’t. In fact, that’s the last thing the team plans on doing as it looks to bounce back from its first loss of the season, a 24-22 home defeat at the hands of the St. Louis Rams. That loss, while frustrating and disappointing, is now a thing of the past.

“I think it’s a 24-hour rule,” coach Bruce Arians said. “When your veterans come in Wednesday to go to work, your young guys will follow them.

“Young guys, a guy like David (Johnson), who had a bad play or two, veterans get him ready to go. Carson (Palmer) does a great job offensively, Frostee (Rucker) and Calais (Campbell) and Pat (Peterson) defensively. This is a time for your leadership to stand up, and if you have really good leadership, you won’t lose two in a row.”

Really, a loss — or maybe even multiple losses — was to be expected. While no one wanted to lose a game, there isn’t one person who felt like the Cardinals were going to run the table and go a perfect 19-0 this season. And while few expected their first blemish to come at home against the Rams, it did happen and there is nothing the Cardinals can do about it now other than learn from it and move on.

As Arians said, a big part of that is the veterans who have been in this situation before stepping up and ensuring everyone does what they are supposed to do. One of the leaders the coach mentioned was Palmer, a quarterback who was on the field in a losing effort for the first time since 2013.

“We came into today with the right mindset, from the attention to details this morning, to sticking around after practice and going through some stuff that we worked on today,” Palmer said Wednesday.  “We’ll be ready on Sunday.”

The way the Cardinals see it, turning the page really isn’t all that difficult. Arians said players and coaches probably have an easier time getting over losses than fans do because they all have to get to work preparing for the next game.

“We can’t dwell,” he said. “They have to go work and cry, and rightfully so until they get another win. Drink a lot of beer. We don’t have time to worry about that last game. It’s over, or it’ll linger into the next one.”

That’s just it, really. There are still 12 games left on the schedule, and at 3-1 the Cardinals are still in great position to accomplish their goals. One Week 4 slip up does not a season ruin, though allowing one loss to snowball into more could.

Remember, it was not long ago — 2012, to be exact — when the Cardinals won their first four games before reeling off 10 consecutive losses. Odds are that will not happen this year, as this team is considerably more talented than that one. Then again, a repeat of last season, when the Cardinals started with three wins, lost in Week 4 and then ran off six straight victories, is not to be expected, either.

The Cardinals are less focused on the future than they are the present, and as linebacker LaMarr Woodley said, the only focus is correcting the mistakes that led to Sunday’s loss and ensuring they do not occur again in Detroit.

“Not just as a veteran, but I think just as a football player, as a young player you understand about winning, you understand about losing,” he said. “You understand that even when winning there’s going to be mistakes, and when losing it’s just going to show a little bit more because you lost.

“So it’s just everybody individually correcting themselves, the things that they did, so as a team we can go out there and play better.”

How the Cardinals play Sunday will tell a lot about the team and its prospects going forward. Arians said the matchup will offer a chance to see what this team is made of since it is responding to the type of loss it usually doesn’t suffer, while Palmer admitted it could be good for a team to drop a game because it allows them to embrace the challenge of coming back the next time out.

That mentality may be coming from the top down, but it has permeated throughout the entire locker room. Nobody is guaranteeing anything, but there is a confidence that the Cardinals will come out ready to erase the memory of that first loss.

In fact, maybe it took a defeat to get the team to re-focus.

“I’m sure it can, in some ways,” safety Deone Bucannon said. “There’s positives and negatives to everything. But at the same time, we know what talent we have and we know who we have.

“The loss, you’re going to lose — there’s going to be a time, a couple times where you’re going to take a loss from a team — because it’s the NFL, everybody’s a professional, everybody gets paid to do this as well. But we want to make the losing less — we didn’t want to lose at all — we want to make that not a re-occurring thing so we’ll continue to come in here and work every day.”

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